Growing up, I didn't think I liked horror. In some ways I was your stereotypical overprotected millennial, wrapped in psychological Styrofoam. It didn't help that I was a pretty sensitive child, prone to screaming when cars passed too fast or when my mum rearranged the furniture. I can't blame my parents for shielding me from spooky movies.
It was though my love of reading that I encountered things that were, if not marketed as horror, at least horror-adjacent. I was a huge Roald Dahl fan, and I can't think of a single one of his books that doesn't deal in some way with the macabre or the horrifying. I've seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory described as a PG-rated slasher film and Matilda as Carrie for pre-teens. Then there's The Witches, with its mixture of body horror and existentialism. The film version captured the former but avoided the latter with a happier ending that by all accounts Dahl hated.
Less well-known is George's Marvellous Medicine, a book about a boy who decides one day to poison his grandmother with household chemicals. He accidentally creates a magical potion, but I cannot overemphasise how much that was not his starting goal.
For a child like me, bullied at school and stifled at home, the grotesque world Dahl painted was familiar and fascinating, and ultimately hopeful in how its cruellest characters always got what was coming to them.
I spent my lunch breaks working my way through my school library. I avoided the Goosebumps series with their lurid covers. They were horror, you see, and I thought I didn't like horror. Still, I found myself stumbling over grisly stories elsewhere. One that has stuck in my memory, though its title eludes me, was about a boy who acquired a machine that could speed up time. I can't even remember how the plot went, except for its climax, where the machine is used on another boy who’s entered an eating contest. He gorges himself on spaghetti in ultra-fast motion, before finally either vomiting an ocean onto the dumbstruck audience or bursting Mr. Creosote-style.
When I was trying to remember where I read that story, the title Quirky Tails popped into my head. I googled it and realised that was a different collection of horror-adjacent stories I’d read. A glimpse at the Wikipedia summaries reawakened my memories: tales of haunted taxidermists and wishes gone wrong. The one that makes me shiver just remembering it is the last one in the collection, titled 'No is Yes'. It's about a girl raised in isolation as a cruel experiment by her father, who communicates to her only in backwards English.
I won't spoil the ending of this one. Apparently the author, Paul Jennings, didn't want it published with the others. He thought it was too dark for children and better suited for young adults. I'm not sure if I agree with that. At the time, I was less spooked by that story than I was by the one about the garden gnome (trust me, that one was messed up). It's only looking back now that 'No is Yes' gives me chills.
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